2022/2023 Update: Teaching @ Bates + Film Projects

It’s been a while! Since I last posted, I moved to Maine, completed and defended my dissertation in 2022 while teaching in the Anthropology Department at Bates College, and started post-production on Viking Futures film. I am just wrapping up the last week of grading for my Spring Short Term course Economic Ecologies now and will be revising my manuscript and article drafts with an editor to prepare for press and journal submission.

I also was so pleased to teach an incredible group of Bates students in my Spring Ethnographic Filmmaking course. The course is titled, Multimedia Storytelling for Social Change and students pushed their growing edges to create incredible media projects. Last week, we were so pleased to share them in a public screening with Bates community. One film featured a the proprietor of a local Thai restaurant in a gas station in Lewiston where Bates is located, Tina Thai Express. While we watched, we munched on delicious dishes from Tina’s. Another student’s film, juxtaposed the experiences of Black and African Bates students with research on institutional aims for diversity and inclusion. Students projects also included the social and class dynamics in Bates’s parking politics and car culture, the political and racial dynamics of hallucinogenic mushrooms on campus and the U.S., and emotional and personal portraits of Bates’s Latinx students’ experiences.

Research on the Viking Futures book project continues. With generous support from the Bates College Faculty Development Fund, I conducted research in Iceland in summer 2021 and summer 2022. I will not be returning to Iceland this summer so I can focus on revising for publication and making a cut of my documentary film project on the Panama Papers Offshore Banking Scandal and protests in 2016. But, I hope to return in 2024 to see friends, interlocutors, and continue archival research.

I am looking forward to returning to the Anthropology Department at Bates College for my third and final year as a Visiting Assistant Professor there. I am not looking forward to a year of job and postdoc applications but am always excited to meet and make new friends and thinking-partners where I land.

Sending care and joy to friends and colleagues across our oceans and air.

Dr. Jen K. AlVarez Hughes

Teaching and Writing During Covid-19 + MSP Uprising

Covid-19 and Teaching in Anthropology during the Minneapolis Uprising

Since February 2020, I have been living and working from my apartment in South Minneapolis, just 11 blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by members of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25, 2020 and in a neighborhood near the epicenter of the Minneapolis Uprising. This is the second neighborhood I have lived in in Minnesota where a community member was murdered by police officers - the other was Philando Castille, murdered by Falcon Heights Police officers on July 6, 2016 (about 10 blocks from where I lived when I returned from fieldwork). As I write about whiteness and the North Atlantic, I think about George and Philando and my neighbors and all of the important work by black and indigenous-led organizers in our cities. I’m grateful that through RIGS, I get to support and facilitate spaces for folks to meet, talk, make, write, refuse together.

I also wanted to name that I, like many other graduate students and instructors, had to quickly become mental health support for our students, peers as Covid-19 has spread. Meanwhile, so many have had to become teachers to our teachers about a great many things from recording lectures to how to name and fight white supremacy that permeates academic interactions, spaces, generational wealth, access to education, and institutional hierarchies. I’m grateful to have wonderful mentors and students, and an incredibly supportive advisor and committee who are not new to this fight but are in conversation and action about reparations, refusals, and addressing complicity in anti-blackness, and indigenous and native erasure (among others).

I’m also deeply grateful to my interlocutors from Iceland and all over the world. Our conversations stay with me and push me to keep writing, talking, thinking, owning up, and making new. I get to hear your voices and see your faces in my recordings of our time together and hope to see you all in person someday soon. <3

Stay tuned for writing and film updates. And if you would like some cool Racial Justice Resources, please check out these compiled by RIGS Director, Professor Kat Hayes and Public Historian, Denise Pike, M.A.

Be well and in care! ~Jen

Fall 2020 Update - New Job

It’s been so long since I posted an update but one is certainly in order!

Since my last update, I’ve continued my research, film work, and writing and have been teaching in various capacities at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I’ve supported the interdisciplinary work of students, community, and colleagues through research assistantships and facilitating writing retreats and workshops for graduate students in affiliation with the Center for the Study for the Premodern World and the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIGS) Initiative at the UMN. I had the pleasure to do some service and professional development as an Advisory Board Member for The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (member from 2019-2020) and the Institute for Advanced Study (member from 2018-2020) at the UMN.

New Job!

In August 2020, I accepted a new position as a Research Assistant and Program Coordinator at the RIGS Initiative (whoo hoo!). In Spring 2021, this role will expand to a Postdoctoral Fellowship and I’m incredibly honored to do this work. RIGS began because of student and faculty activism and now is a hub for the Critical, Race, and Ethnic Studies Graduate Writing Group, the Critical Disability Studies Collective and our six affiliate programs:

Screenshot of the RIGS Initiative Website, September 24, 2020, featuring students in a RIGS working group discussion.

• Asian American Studies Program

• Department of African American & African Studies

• Department of American Studies

• Department of American Indian Studies

• Department of Chicano & Latino Studies

• Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

A little rewind

Summer of 2019, I interned at Morgan Stanley, Minneapolis, doing research on funds for a team focused on Sustainable Wealth Management and ESG (Environment, Society, and Governance). This experience was helpful to think through methods and approaches for a future book/film project on how ESG/Sustainability practices intersect with the production of whiteness, homo-normativity, and gender in the New North Atlantic.

In Fall 2019, I worked as a research assistant for Erin Durban and Miranda Joseph and taught an evening section of my department’s Intro to Anthropology course, “Understanding Cultures” where I focused on the economic and raced, sexed, and gendered aspects of “The Science and Politics of Storytelling”. Spring 2020, I taught 110 students and mentored three first-year graduate student teachers in the lecture/honors section of this introductory course. I moved instruction online during what was to be our Spring Break and taught a 100% asynchronous online version of my class to mostly non-traditionally aged and returning students in Summer 2020. I will miss teaching undergraduates this year but am happy to get to work with graduate writers. Trade-offs!

Be well and in care! ~Jen

Don’t forget to vote!

Vote up the ballot! Vote local and vote early!

Summer 2019 Update

Exciting News this Summer!

Fellowships

I was awarded a Hella Mears Graduate Disseration Fellowship by the Center for German and European Studies at the UMN-Twin Cities for Summer 2019 to complete dissertation chapters and work on my film project.

Employment

I also started an internship at Morgan Stanely-Minneapolis to work for a dear friend doing research on sustainable investing, marketing outreach and values-based business development.

Publishing

In July 2019, my Teaching Tools post, “Teaching Storytelling and Financial Crisis” was published in Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsites blog. Many thanks again to Tariq Rahman (UC Irvine) for co-editing that article and our other post for the same series, “What is Finance? A Conversation with Keith Hart, Daromir Rudnyckyj, and Caitlin Zaloom”.

Teaching

In Fall 2019, I’m very excited to teach ANTH 1003 (10): Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Understanding Cultures) as the Science and Politics of Storytelling. I am not teaching this summer since I have the fellowship but I am taking some time to develop syllabi for Spring 2020 and will be a TA for a TBD course this fall as well!

Public Talks and Events

Finally, excited to announce my roundtable for the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society (AAA/CASCA), "Toward a Critical Queer and Trans Economic Anthropology" was accepted. Many thanks to the Association for Queer Anthropology for the "invited" status and the people who expressed interest even if they couldn't participate. Please attend and fill the room! Ask hard questions! I put the roundtable together after many folks had already committed to other panels so we will leave much time for Q & A. That way, folks not or under represented can participate in discussion, especially contingent and adjunct faculty, graduate and undergraduate students and non-white, non-settler, non-cis folks.

AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting Roundtable, “Toward a Critical Queer and Trans Economic Anthropology”.

I was inspired by Gayle Rubin's call to analyze and account for our investments that limit radical analysis and hope to continue this conversation long after Vancouver. So happy to get to speak with folks I've been reading and thinking with for years and hopefully you, too.

And while you’re at it, stop by the panel I co-organized with Aaron Hopes (Stanford U.), “The Island Effect: On the Conditions of the Pelagic Military "Outpost" (more on that very exciting panel soon)!

Check back in late August for info on both AAA/CASCA events and my upcoming talks!

“Inspired by Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984) and AAA/CASCA 2019 Annual Meeting theme of “Changing Climates”, this roundtable and discussion addresses how queer and trans anthropologies might respond to the feminist call in the GENS Manifesto and examine some of the fantastic and radical interdisciplinary queer and trans approaches to studies of capitalism already in practice.”

Jen K. Hughes and Icelandic puppy on Stokkseyrarsel farm, South Iceland 2016. Photo Credit: Margit Barna

Spring 2019 Update

In Spring 2019 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, I am teaching an undergraduate course I designed in 2017-2018 with funds from the Steven J. Schochet Grant for Queer, Trans and Sexuality Studies called Economy, Culture, Critique: Queering Capitalism(s)! The course explores queer and trans approaches to economic anthropology and centers scholars and activists doing work on indigenous queer critique, racial capitalism, critical ethnic studies, (dis)ability and debility studies, and black critical theory (among others). In Summer 2019, I will teach the undergraduate anthropology course, Language, Culture, and Power (and finally get to teach some discourse analysis and linguistics!).

This month, I’m busy co-organizing a panel on (after)lives of imperialized islands with Aaron Hopes (Stanford) and an exciting roundtable on Critical Queer and Trans Economic Anthropology with Karen Z. Ho (University of Minnesota) for the 2019 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, November 20-24 in Vancouver, BC. The roundtable features Noelle Stout (NYU), Scott Laura Morgensen (Queen’s University), Karen Ho (UMN) and Kimberly Chong (LSE), among others. If you are interested in either panel please contact me and stay tuned for updates!

Finally, I’m so happy to announce that I have been awarded a Hella Mears Summer Fellowship for European Studies by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. This fellowship allows me to devote two months this summer to dissertation/book project writing and film editing. I am always, of course, looking for cool new digital, video, editing, and research projects so please contact me with your gigs and great ideas!

First Clips from Viking Futures Film and Research Project at #displace18 Virtual Conference

On April 20, 2018, the first clips from my forthcoming feature-length documentary, Viking Futures, appeared in a video presentation for the 2018 Biennial Society for Cultural Anthropology/Society for Visual Anthropology joint Virtual Conference. Nestled in the Displaced Futures: Sovereignty, Denial and Imagination panel I co-organized with Randi Irwin (Doctoral Candidate at The New School), my short video presentation "New Iceland Now" featured interviews with anti-corruption pro-immigration activists, young politicians and parliamentarians, feminist media-entrepreneurs, and noted anthropologist of Iceland, genetics and environment, Gísli Pálsson. Stay tuned for more trailers and teasers, Summer 2018!

Also, check out this radio interview I did called “What Can Women Do to Fight for Equal Pay”, on Iceland’s Equal Pay Law. I was interviewed by Lauren Gilger from KJZZ (National Public Radio affiliate, Arizona), and the show aired January 9, 2018.

Jen at the Seljavallalaug geothermal pool (built 1923), South Iceland, 2016. Photo Credit: Holly L. Magner